When I am looking to sell a domain name by doing end user outreach, I am very cautious with the way I conduct my business. I do my best to individually target leads by name, and I generally find most of my leads searching Google for companies in a specific business or for companies that offer a product or service. I almost always only contact the prospect once (ever) unless they express interest and I negotiate with them.
As a result of the way I do lead generation, I typically only use outbound methods once for a specific domain name. If the domain name is not sold after emailing the leads I find the first time, I usually let the domain name sit and field inbound inquiries. I tend to not try again because I hate receiving uninteresting emails from the same company more than once, and I don’t want to be an annoyance to someone else.
With the recent and ongoing Google changes, it may be worth my time to go back through my list of domain names that didn’t sell in the past to try and find additional prospective buyers. New companies may have entered the space, but more likely, other companies improved their Google search results presence. With the later, it might enable me to find additional targeted leads.
One other factor at play is that a company that has sustained improved results in Google may be seeing better financial results because of their rankings. The company may have more money to spend on business development, and a great domain name may be of interest to the company now.
I’ve done less end user sales outreach this year than in prior years. There are several reasons for this, but the point is that I am not being as aggressive about selling my domain names right now. With that said, I might want to have another look at lead generation on names that failed to sell a year ago or longer. Perhaps I will be able to find new qualified leads. I might try this out for a couple of domain names this week and see how it goes.
“One other factor at play is that a company that has sustained improved results in Google may be seeing better financial results because of their rankings. The company may have more money to spend on business development, and a great domain name may be of interest to the company now.”
You may also want to try the other end of the market too. The company that was sitting top 3 in Google but now is not. I would even tailor the pitch to slightly antagonize so that you say, I have had several inquiries from companies, that I notice have recently had a significant boost in the serps, about this domain.
Given the choice of pitching someone moving up in rankings or down, I would take the desperate down.
Not to teach you how to suck eggs.
Great point!
Good points. It brings home the point of keeping record of what you did instead if emailing at forgetting who you sent to.
Do you use a contact management system?
Not really, but my Mac Mail identifies email addresses I’ve used before, and I have a pretty good memory when it comes to this type of thing.
Unlike many people who use the big gun approach, I generally target just a few prospects, making it easier to remember. I also write the emails by hand instead of automating.
I would be interested in the followup portion, you say you don’t bother hitting companies that you have already hit once but companies such as DNS claim they make a good portion of their sales from following up. I wonder if there’s any correlation, like mentioned above a company you contacted prior may now have the budget when they didn’t then..
DNS follows up on inbound leads, not outbound leads that didn’t receive a reply.
Perhaps a follow up email would help me make deals happen, but I hate it when people email me more than once about a crappy name I don’t have any interest in buying, and I am not going to do something that bothers me when others do it.
I might disagree a bit, the head of Marketing may choose to ignore me while the CEO sees value but I can understand your point as well 🙂